Fools and knaves, part 6

The Obama administration is peddling a new line regarding its inability to hold the old line on the Benghazi murders: the bad dope came from the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who got everything wrong in the days following the attack. DNI spokesman Shawn Turner issued a statement reported by Reuters in the traditional Friday news dump in which scandals go to die. According to the statement: “[W]e revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”

“Extremists,” you may recall, is the Obama administration’s required euphemism for Islamic terrorists. It’s part of the administration’s “smart diplomacy.”

Let us note even Ray Charles could have seen that the Benghazi assault on 9/11 was a premeditated terrorist attack. Even the president of Libya somehow managed to get it right.

Fox News adds a quizzical element to the DNI’s line as reported by Reuters:

Turner, though, sought to explain that officials who discussed the attack as spontaneous did so based on intelligence community assessments.

“In the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo,” he said. “We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available. Throughout our investigation we continued to emphasize that information gathered was preliminary and evolving.”

However, sources have told Fox News that intelligence officials knew within 24 hours the attack that left the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead was terrorism, and that they suspected it was tied to Al Qaeda.